NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Local police officers began confiscating weapons from civilians in preparation for a forced evacuation of the last holdouts still living here, as President Bush steeled the nation for the grisly scenes of recovering the dead that will unfold in coming days.

Police officers and federal law enforcement agents scoured the city carrying assault rifles seeking residents who have holed up to avoid forcible eviction, as well as those who are still considering evacuating voluntarily to escape the city's putrid waters.

"Individuals are at risk of dying," said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of the New Orleans police. "There's nothing more important than the preservation of human life."

Although it appeared Wednesday night that forced evacuations were beginning, on Thursday the authorities were still looking for those willing to leave voluntarily. The police said that the search was about 80 percent done, and that afterward they would begin enforcing Mayor C. Ray Nagin's order to remove residents by force.

Mr. Bush, in Washington, urged the nearly one million people displaced by the storm to contact federal agencies to apply for immediate aid. He praised the outpouring of private charity to the displaced, but said the costs of restoring lives would affect all Americans, as would the horror of the storm's carnage.

"The responsibility of caring for hundreds of thousands of citizens who no longer have homes is going to place many demands on our nation," the president said in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. "We have many difficult days ahead, especially as we recover those who did not survive the storm."

As Mr. Bush spoke, Vice President Dick Cheney was touring Mississippi and Louisiana, in part as an answer to the critics who have said that the administration responded too slowly and timidly to the epic disaster. At a stop in Gulfport, Miss., a heckler shouted an obscenity at the vice president. Mr. Cheney shrugged it off, saying it was the first such abuse he had heard.

Also on Thursday, Congress approved a $51.8 billion package of storm aid, bringing the total to more than $62 billion in a week. The government is now spending $2 billion dollars a day to respond to the disaster.

The confirmed death toll in Louisiana remained at 83 on Thursday. Efforts to recover corpses are beginning, although only a handful of bodies have been recovered so far. Official estimates of the death toll in New Orleans are still vague, but 10,000 remains a common figure.

Mississippi officials said they had confirmed 196 dead as of Thursday, including 143 in coastal areas, although Gov. Haley Barbour said he expected the toll to rise.

"It would just be a guess, but the 200 or just over 300 we think is a credible and reliable figure," the governor said on NBC's "Today" show.

He also said electricity would be restored by Sunday to most homes and businesses in the state that could receive it.

No one would venture a prediction about when the lights would come back on in New Orleans.

The water continued to recede slowly in the city 10 days after Hurricane Katrina swept ashore and levees failed at several points, inundating the basin New Orleans sits in.

The Army Corps of Engineers has restored to operation 37 of the city's 174 permanent pumps, allowing them to drain 11,000 cubic feet of water per second from the basin. When all the pumps are working, they can remove 81,000 cubic feet of water per second, said Dan Hitchings of the engineering corps.

It will be months before the breadth of the devastation from the storm is known. But a report by the Louisiana fisheries department calculated the economic loss to the state's important seafood industry at as much as $1.6 billion over the next 12 months.

Louisiana's insurance commissioner, J. Robert Wooley, said the state had barred insurance companies from canceling any homeowner's insurance policies in the days immediately before the storm hit and afterward.

"All cancellations will be voided," Mr. Wooley said.

Across New Orleans, active-duty soldiers, National Guard members and local law enforcement agencies from across the country continued door-to-door searches by patrol car, Humvee, helicopter and boat, urging remaining residents to leave.

Maj. Gen. James Ron Mason of the Kansas National Guard, who commands about 25,000 Guard troops in and around New Orleans, said his forces had rescued 687 residents by helicopter, boat and high-wheeled truck in the past 24 hours.

General Mason said Guard troops, although carrying M-16 rifles, would not use force to evict recalcitrant citizens. That, he said, was a job for the police, not members of the Guard.

"I don't believe that you will see National Guard soldiers actually physically forcing people to leave," General Mason said.

Mr. Compass, the police superintendent, said that after a week of near anarchy in the city, no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns, or other firearms of any kind. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.

That order apparently does not apply to the hundreds of security guards whom businesses and some wealthy individuals have hired to protect their property. The guards, who are civilians working for private security firms like Blackwater, are openly carrying M-16s and other assault rifles.

Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.

New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard troops and active-duty soldiers. While armed looters roamed unchecked last week, the city is now calm.

The city's slow recovery is continuing on other fronts as well, local officials said at a late morning news conference. Pumping stations are now operating across much of the city, and many taps and fire hydrants have water pressure. Tests have shown no evidence of cholera or other dangerous diseases in flooded areas.

With pumps running and the weather here remaining hot and dry, water has visibly receded across much of the city. Formerly flooded streets are now passable, although covered with leaves, tree branches and mud.

Still, many neighborhoods in the northern half of New Orleans remain under 10 feet of water, and Mr. Compass said Thursday that the city's plans for a forced evacuation remained in effect because of the danger of disease and fires.

Mr. Compass said he could not disclose when residents might be forced to leave en masse. The city's police department and federal law enforcement officers from agencies like United States Marshals Service will lead the evacuation, he said. Officers will search houses in both dry and flooded neighborhoods, and no one will be allowed to stay, he said.

Many of the residents still in the city said they did not understand why the city remained intent on forcing them out.

freeman

09-09-2005, 04:55 AM

...And on a related note, here's a bleeding heart liberal who is curiously sounding a lot like Truebeliever...

Arming the Left: Is the Time Now? (http://legitgov.org/essay_southwell_arming_the_left_is_the_time_now_10 2203.html)

Arming the Left: Is the time now? --by Charles Southwell*

I hope you didn't open this page to read what we already know: that this is the most rightwing government we have ever had in the US, even far right of Bush I, that our rights are being eroded daily, and that our democratic process is all but gone, if it isn't already gone.

I hope you came here to read about tactics for action that will finally have some consequence. I hope you agree that our protests, petitions, letters, and on and on, have been utterly ignored. The fascistas that run our country laugh at us. They believe they can do anything and that we haven't got the guts to revolt, but only to wage a war of words. I have seen the Bush cavalcades, as they drive away, his aids sneering and jeering and laughing and mocking our protests. They think we are a JOKE. Tens of millions of Americans protested the war, but because we posed no REAL THREAT to their power, we were UTTERLY IGNORED.

As long as we pose no REAL threat to the powers-that-be, to what is shaping up into a dictatorship, we will continue to be ignored. Right now, we are ignored because we present no organized power to fight this onslaught of anti-democratic, totalitarian government that we are up against.

It will take time, but it's time to get more left-leaning liberals and outright leftists to at least POSE a threat, by getting organized and getting ARMED. It's time to get well past this liberal phobia and taboo about weapons and force. After all, our liberalism was won with a REVOLUTIONARY WAR! they used real guns in that war. The French Revolution was also a WAR and they used real weapons there too.

Perhaps people believe that since the US federal government has the fire power to blow up the world X times over, that we have no chance, and that the 2nd amendment is therefore moot. I used to think the same thing. In fact, this was the major if not the only lasting upshot of the Cold War! the Cold war wasn't about one opposing ideology against the other; it wasn't about the East vs. the West. In the end, it was about the respective governments against their own peoples. The Cold War resulted in the repression of the peoples in those countries, and likewise, of peoples around the world.

But, it is still a myth that the US citizens are powerless against their government, a government that has become tyrannical and has usurped our democratic rights. We are not powerless against it. If we get organized and armed, and form a force of hundreds of thousands, we can overcome this government, or pose enough of a threat to have power. The government cannot drop a nuclear bomb on DC. It cannot risk the lives of whole cities, without revealing its own contradictions that is. Further, there is no guarantee that the military will remain loyal to a government that continually reveals itself as imperialistic and ruthless and having no real concern for its own personnel. The Iraqi occupation is teaching many of them that hard lesson. They are realizing that not Hussein, but the Bush regime, is their real enemy.

So I ask you, isn't it time that left-leaning liberals and leftists exercised their 2nd amendment rights and got organized and prepared? Isn't it time, before it's too late? Isn't it time, before another Bush coup and the following four years of increased repression and economic ruin?

We should remain committed to the absolute condemnation of individual acts of violence or terrorism. Read Trotsky's essay on terrorism, in the political education section of this website. Our reference to Trotsky does not mean that we are Marxists. I am merely referring to a good argument for any real revolutionaries against terrorism. We want a democratic government, which is not predicated on a Marxist state. In fact, we leave that to the future of the new movement for democracy, given that the future should be democratic and in a democracy, the people will decide. But, our goal is to make a future wherein the people CAN and WILL decide!!!!!!

09-09-2005, 07:42 AM

Disarming citizens, entering their homes and forcing them to leave!!!

Are they seizing their property, too????

I say let them stay if they choose to do so!!!

freeman

09-09-2005, 08:39 AM

Are they seizing their property, too????

Of course that is part of the program, as we have already observed on this forum. That BS in the NY Times article about protecting the victims' homeowner policies is just that. Posession is nine-tenths of the law, as the old saying go. As long as the owners aren't present to begin the immediate salvage of their properties, the way is cleared for Haliburton and assorted elite scum to initiate seizure proceedings under pretenses like "public safety". Oh sure, the property owners may get some sort of perfunctory remuneration (in addition to whatever insurance they can collect), but they will never be returning to their neighborhoods again. Expect to see New Orleans rebuilt as a high end development, well beyond the economic means of its former inhabitants.
And just in case you have any doubts, let's review the end of the Times article:

The city's police department and federal law enforcement officers from agencies like United States Marshals Service will lead the evacuation, he said. Officers will search houses in both dry and flooded neighborhoods, and no one will be allowed to stay, he said.

Many of the residents still in the city said they did not understand why the city remained intent on forcing them out.

...in both dry and flooded nieghborhoods?
Case closed.

09-09-2005, 08:57 AM

Basically, they have condemed the city and, so be it, the property and possessions are left behind for seizure.

No wonder those who survived and are still in their homes don't want to leave.

What guarantees are they given? NONE!!!

How many do you think lived in Section 8 housing? How many will not collect insurance money due to the fact that, if they had homeowner coverage, flooding is not normally a part of the protection??

However, wouldn't you think that living in a FLOOD ZONE would be mandatory coverage???

How convenient!!

nohope187

09-09-2005, 03:05 PM

freeman wrote:
...And on a related note, here's a bleeding heart liberal who is curiously sounding a lot like Truebeliever...

Arming the Left: Is the Time Now? (http://legitgov.org/essay_southwell_arming_the_left_is_the_time_now_10 2203.html)

[quote]Arming the Left: Is the time now? --by Charles Southwell*
I thought it was the left side of the dialectic that was openly for gun control? That's funny. Little doest this liberal fellow know that the elite is already 10 steps ahead of him. Even if his hypothetical revolt gathered momentum, it would be put down by DHS & FEMA. And as soon as FEMA, hit N.O., you could already see the gun/property confiscation coming a mile away.